Scream · reception & legacy
1996 · Wes Craven
How Scream has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It opened quietly in December 1996 against Christmas blockbusters, then word-of-mouth turned it into a sleeper smash that single-handedly resurrected the slasher genre. Thirty years on it's gone from 'clever hit' to unassailable canon — the meta-horror urtext everything since gets measured against.
What's debated
The perennial fight: did Scream's winking self-awareness save the slasher or ruin horror by making irony mandatory for a decade?
Its footprint
"What's your favorite scary movie?" is one of the most quoted lines in horror, the Ghostface mask is a permanent Halloween-costume fixture, and the film's own working title — 'Scary Movie' — was cheekily claimed by the parody franchise it spawned.
Where it stands
A Letterboxd perennial and the consensus 'you must have seen this' entry point to the slasher genre — 90s horror's one truly untouchable pick.